As you climb the career ladder, you realize you need to allocate more time to strategic work and less to your well-known tactical tasks. Regretfully, we learned and perfected our day-to-day chores (and that led to a promotion!), but we had no previous training on strategy.
Furthermore, there is no clear path to learn product strategy, and no agreed-upon “go-to” resource to start developing this muscle. There are however a few good options I would recommend to anyone seeking to improve these skills.
Books
My first go-to type of resource is books. While there are a lot available on strategy, I can recommend 4 that stand out for different reasons.
1. Good strategy / Bad strategy
In this must-read book, Professor Rumelt removes all the fluff and buzzwords surrounding the topic and describes what a good, focused, and insightful strategy is.
2. Value Proposition Design
The creation of the value proposition will help you understand your customer needs and what offer would result in a successful product. While it is not a book on strategy per se, the deep understanding of how you will create a differentiated value proposition is the basis to create a strategy that focuses on generating it.
3. Understanding Michael Porter
Porter is a well-known strategy guru who published 20 books and numerous articles. While everyone knows his name, his books are hard to read and his ideas ofter misinterpreted.
Joan Magretta summarizes the most important concepts Porter developed over his career: Competitive advantage, The value chain, Five forces, Industry structure, Differentiation, Relative cost.
4. Blue Ocean Strategy
Published in 2004, the ideas of professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne quickly gained popularity. Understanding how to differentiate based on particular attributes to better serve particular segments is nowadays a common practice in product strategy.
Some more books
While they may not make it to the top 10 resources, there are two extra options worth mentioning:
- Playing to Windescribes the choices and focus companies must have to win in their segments. Most examples are from physical products, but lessons are applicable to the digital world.
- Obviously Awesome: probably more marketing oriented, it focuses on how you find the right product positioning, which is core to define a strategy that reinforces your advantage and value proposition to your clients.
Article Series
While books are great, sometimes they are not up to date or have more generic advice. Articles on the other hand can have more up-to-date tools and examples related to modern product strategy.
5. Marty Cagan Series
With a set of 5 articles, the well-known product guru provides clarity on what strategy is and describes the role of management in helping its execution.
6. Gibson Biddle Series
With a more practical approach, Gibson Biddle provides 12 steps to define a solid product strategy, using real Netflix examples.
7. McKinsey enduring ideas
Not necessarily modern or product-related, this set of 9 tools by McKinsey have been successfully used for strategic decision making for decades, and they are worth considering.
Strategy guru’s analysis
When learning how to play a new sport, it is always useful (and fun) to see how an expert does it. Regretfully, unless you have a great manager, it is unlikely that you can see this sort of strategic analysis in real-life, and most accessible “case studies” are more than 5 years old.
There are however a few renowned “product strategy analysts” who post newsletters or articles dissecting the moves of the biggest tech companies and the tendencies in the industry. It is both good to be informed and also to better understand how to analyze strategy in the wild.
8. Stratechery
Ben Thompson provides different types of content like long-form analysis, newsletters, and podcasts mostly regarding the latest trends of tech giants.
9. Benedict Evans
With many years as VC and strategy consultant, Ben Evans also provides newsletters and essays “about what’s happening in tech that actually matters, and what it means” (in his own words).
10. Andrew Chen
Not very active nowadays, but Andrew Chen has over 650 essays, slightly oriented to startups, marketing, and growth.
Humbly adding my own resources
I’ve been writing lately about product strategy and created a multi-part series.
How to set and improve your Product Strategy
And also Product Direction, my upcoming book, describing at length, with examples and templates, the process to successfully create and link the Product Strategy, Roadmaps, and OKRs.
You can download here a pre-launch free section.